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Ubuntu Plans To Move To Systemd's Logind

Phoronix: Ubuntu Plans To Move To Systemd's Logind

While Ubuntu developers still are set on continuing to use their own Upstart event-based init daemon rather than the widely-used systemd, the developers at Canonical are planning to begin using systemd's logind component...

Ok at this point, it's all WTF to me. They do what they want, who even gives a crap anymore...

Their decisions are quite strange. At first MIR has no advantage over Wayland and now they want some part from systemd which is way better than upstart. I think they just don't have enough courage to admit upstart is worse.

So Many Changes All At Once

Ok so Canonical has always gone ahead and added their own differentiators to the Ubuntu ecosystem - things like Upstart and Unity in Ubuntu itself, and things like Launchpad and Ubuntu One as revolving around and enhancing Ubuntu, but they've always done a little bit at a time. Now they're simultaneously developing multiple separate systems (at least until they start making progress on their convergence goals), developing their own display server, contributing resources to help new software like Steam come to Linux, continuing to maintain and evolve software that hasn't been widely adopted outside Ubuntu, talking about switching to a rolling release model, and now this? Does Canonical have an infinite credit line or something? I thought they still weren't profitable. First: do they really have the means by which they can support so many projects at once? And second, even if they have the money to undertake this much all at once, isn't so many changes all at the same time just a recipe for corporate and engineering confusion, and thus disaster?

I mean, shouldn't they at some point just say, "Fsck controlling everything, let's go back to letting someone else do the work on some of these subsystems." Granted, they can't keep using ConsoleKit if it's unmaintained, and forking it or taking over maintenance themselves is not the solution to being stretched out like this, but rather than throw energy into new stuff while they're still working out core issues with the old stuff, that to me is just, I don't know, crazy. If they're cherry-picking systemd components, wouldn't it be smarter to dump Upstart for systemd completely, take a little bit of time making sure that they integrate systemd correctly and that it does what they want it to, and then redirect the resources previously lost on Upstart towards one of their other projects?

To me, it's not clear that systemd is superior for all use cases.
Specifically, if I use system startup scripts, I expect that they will be ready ahead of time (at the earliest opportunity).

System startup scripts?? Like custom ones? Its actually better to use systemd then...dump them in /etc, and those will override anything in /usr. You get your custom startup file, with a sane default backup, and you dont have to muck with symlinks or backup files or anything.

To me, it's not clear that systemd is superior for all use cases.
Specifically, if I use system startup scripts, I expect that they will be ready ahead of time (at the earliest opportunity).

Why can't you just have your scripts with Before=sysinit.target? It means they run as soon as systemd starts.

System startup scripts?? Like custom ones? Its actually better to use systemd then...dump them in /etc, and those will override anything in /usr. You get your custom startup file, with a sane default backup, and you dont have to muck with symlinks or backup files or anything.

I agree with this. After using systemd for a year, if I need to write a boot script, it is very intuitive to just specify wants=, before=, after=, and requires= in a .service file to run an arbitrary script I have elsewhere in the fs. It doesn't hurt that I hate bash syntax and prefer writing scripts in python, even if I have to use subprocess a bit, and if I write a service file the actual script can be in any language easily.